Retro Lines Design

I’ve followed his blog for a while and have always enjoyed the collection of tutorials and round-ups he’s provided. Fairly recently he posted a neat tutorial on creating a monochromatic poster design similar to the line design for the 1968 Olympics in Mexico. It was a play off of a typographic poster that he posted in a round-up a couple days earlier.

My Adaptation of the Design

I really liked the design and tutorial. It was very minimalist and was one of those designs that pulled your eye inward. You almost couldn’t help but follow the lines. I enjoyed the design so much that I created a very similar, if not identical version to the one that Chris had posted. I then looked at my design and wanted to take it a step further, to make it my own.

The design seemed very old fashioned to me, not in a bad way, but in a vintage way. The way that an old Schwinn, Atari gaming system, or Polaroid Camera is. I wanted to bring this retro-ness to light; I decided to make another design done in a retro color scheme.

I went on kuler and put together a color scheme that I felt worked. The raw color scheme is shown to the left. After I selected the colors that I wanted, I went though the same process of making an art brush out of my new, colored lines and applying to stroke of a line drawing.

The Slight Process Differences

The only difference between my stroke method and the one laid out by Chris Spooner was that in order for my strokes to line up properly with the colors was to flip the strokes along the paths. Despite this alteration, I laid the path out very similarly to Chris’s tutorial and then brought it over to Photoshop to add some texturing and filtering. I used one of the fantastic paper textures Chris linked to and highlighted in a somewhat similar fashion to Chris by just using a very lightly pressured white brush.

On top of adding some highlights and textures to my design, I also wanted to give some more depth to the overlapping lines: I added some very intentional and specific shadows in order to create a subtle, yet visible depth of field to everything.

The End Result

The End Result was intended for my wallpaper on my 27″ iMac and my old “BlackBook” so I made the original design in the huge 2560 x 1440 size for my big display. I think the colors, design, and textures fit together very well and help make a very interesting and yet sophisticated design. You can see a larger version by clicking on the thumbnail below.